So much for Sam's Club

By BEN SMITH

08/14/2011 09:16 AM EDT

The departure of Tim Pawlenty this morning won't have a major impact on a race that had already taken shape without him -- that's why he dropped out.

The move makes clear that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has fully seized the space Pawlenty sought to occupy, of the established conservative alternative. It also marks a failure of the Sam's Club conservative brand Pawlenty sought, at times, to personify.

That notion of a populist conservatism with a blue-collar edge fit Pawlenty's story, and his denunciations of the trifecta of Big Government, Big Labor and Big Business fit its populist model. But the idea was ultimately a solution for a party tacking to the center, and this is a moment dominated by the right. Pawlenty, sensing that, never fully adopted that populism -- his denunciations of Big Business, for instance, didn't have a real policy aspect to go with them. He used his blue-collar biography as an appealing detail but couldn't connect it to a larger, different pitch.

Sam's Club conservatism was floated by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam when the Republican Party felt a need to reinvent itself. It seems to have lost out, in Pawlenty's campaign and in the party, to the tea party grass roots, interested in rolling government back, not reshaping it.